What is the source of interest rate volatility? Why do low interest rates precede business cycle booms? Most observers tend to assume that monetary policy is largely responsible for it. Indeed, a standard real business cycle model delivers rather small fluctuations in real interest rates. Here,...

One explanation for the usefulness of financial variables as tools for economic forecasting is that they embody the expectations of economic agents about the future state of the economy. In this paper, we test whether interest rate volatility contains information on the expectations of agents...

This paper demonstrates that in macroeconomic models with nominal rigidities, a global solution exists that supports an alternate equilibrium where traditional Taylor rules give rise to self-fulfilling aggregate volatility and excess risk-premium. Within the rational expectations framework, we...

We assess whether the euro had an impact first on the degree of integration of European financial markets, and, second, on the euro area term structure. We propose two methodologies to measure integration: one relies on time-varying GARCH correlations, and the other one on a regression...

It is well-known that interest rates are extremely persistent, yet they are best modeled and understood as stationary processes. These properties are contradictory in the workhorse Gaussian affine term structure model in which persistent data often result in unit roots that imply...

Nominal yields can be expressed as the sum of an expectation, term premium, and convexity component, and in turn of their real and inflation counterparts. We extract these terms from the yield curve of the U.S., Euro Area, U.K., and Japan using a term structure model that explicitly captures the...

Compared with stocks, bonds are more directly affected by fluctuations in oil prices through the expected inflation component in nominal bond yields. Surprisingly, prior literature finds little predictive power of oil price changes on bond excess returns. This finding is counter intuitive,...

We incorporate a latent stochastic volatility factor and macroeconomic expectations in an affine model for the term structure of nominal and real rates. We estimate the model over 1999-2016 on U.S. data for nominal and TIPS yields, the realized and implied volatility of T-bonds and survey...

The 2007 subprime crisis has induced a persistent disconnection between the LIBOR derivative markets of different tenors and the OIS swap market. Commonly proposed explanations for the corresponding spreads are a combination of credit risk and liquidity risk. However in these explanations the...

This paper characterizes time variation in the link between macroeconomic risk and variation in the yield curve. Based on a term structure model with time-varying variance decomposition, I show that the macroeconomic share of the variation in short-term yields has increased since the 1970s. A...